Serious about comics

Françoise Mouly, art editor at the New Yorker magazine for more than 20 years, will deliver Skidmore's Fox-Adler Lecture on Monday, Sept. 18, at 5:30 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium. Her talk, titled "Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See," is free and open to the public. A reception and book-signing will follow in the lobby.

Many of her 1,000-plus New Yorker covers have been chosen as best of the year by the American Society of Magazine Editors, and in 2012 she released Blown Covers, about the creative process behind these much-anticipated, eclectic, and sometimes iconic illustrations.

Mouly also founded the award-winning Toon Books and Toon Graphics for young readers. With husband Art Spiegelman (of Maus fame), she co-created the groundbreaking comics anthology RAW, the New York Times-bestselling Little Lit series and the Toon children's comics series. The afternoon before her public Skidmore lecture, Mouly will meet with invited students and faculty to discuss her latest project, a free graphic publication called Resist.

Mouly won Smithsonian's 2015 Ingenuity Award as a "transformative figure in comics." She was also named a Chevalier by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and received France's Legion d'honneur.